Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created the “Dilbert” comic strip, has died at the age of 68, his first ex-wife revealed on Tuesday. Adams said last year that he was diagnosed with an aggressive prostate cancer.
Adams’ ex-wife, Shelly Miles, announced the news of his death during a live stream of his YouTube show, “Real Coffee with Scott Adams.”
She read a “final message” from Adams on the show, in which he wrote that he had “an amazing life” and gave it everything he had. He urged people to “be useful” and said, “please know I loved you all to the very end.”
Lea Suzuki/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
Adams said on an episode of his show last May that he had “the same cancer that Joe Biden has … prostate cancer that has also spread to my bones.”
He made the announcement a day after Biden announced his own diagnosis.
President Trump posted about Adams’ death on Tuesday, calling him “a fantastic guy, who liked and respected me when it wasn’t fashionable to do so.”
“He bravely fought a long battle against a terrible disease,” Mr. Trump said on Truth Social. “My condolences go out to his family, and all of his many friends and listeners. He will be truly missed. God bless you Scott!”
Vice President JD Vance called Adams “a true American original, and a great ally to the President of the United States and the entire administration.”
Dilbert the comic strip first appeared in 1989, poking fun at office culture. It ran for decades in numerous newspapers until 2023, when it was canceled by most newspapers over comments by Adams that various publishers denounced as racist, hateful and discriminatory.
Among other things, Adams referred to Black people as members of a “hate group” and urged White people “to get the hell away from Black people.” Newspapers such the Los Angeles Times and the USA Today network as well as distributor Andrews McMeel Universal announced they would no longer work with the cartoonist or run his strip.
Adams took to YouTube at the time to defend himself and disclosed details about the impact of losing business, saying he was likely to lose 80% of his income from Dilbert due to the cancellations.
In the message Miles read on the show Tuesday, Adams said that he wanted to explain his life. He said he spent the first part of it focusing on making himself a worthy husband and parent as a way to find meaning, then later “donated” himself to the world and evolved from Dilbert cartoonist to “an author of what I thought would be useful books.”
“From that point on I looked for ways I could add the most to peoples’ life, one way or another,” he wrote.
Poking fun at corporate culture and, later, “wokeness”
Adams earned a bachelor’s degree from Hartwick College and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. He worked a corporate job at the Pacific Bell telephone company in the 1980s, sharing his cartoons to amuse co-workers. He drew Dilbert as a computer programmer and engineer for a high-tech company and mailed a batch to cartoon syndicators.
The first “Dilbert” comic strip officially appeared April 16, 1989, long before such workplace comedies as “Office Space” and “The Office.” It portrayed corporate culture as a Kafkaesque world of heavy bureaucracy and pointless benchmarks, where employee effort and skill were underappreciated.
Adams was the 1997 recipient of the National Cartoonist Society’s Reuben Award, considered one of the most prestigious awards for cartoonists. That same year, “Dilbert” became the first fictional character to make Time magazine’s list of the most influential Americans.
“Dilbert” strips were routinely photocopied, pinned up, emailed and posted online, a popularity that would spawn bestselling books, merchandise, commercials for Office Depot and an animated TV series, with Daniel Stern voicing Dilbert.
While Adams’ career fall seemed swift, careful readers of “Dilbert” saw a gradual darkening of the strip’s tone and its creator’s mindset.
He attracted attention for controversial comments, including saying in 2011 that women are treated differently by society for the same reason as children and the mentally disabled — “it’s just easier this way for everyone.” In a blog post from 2006, he questioned the death toll of the Holocaust.
In June 2020, Adams tweeted that when the “Dilbert” TV show ended in 2000 after just two seasons, it was “the third job I lost for being white.” But, at the time, he blamed it on lower viewership and time slot changes.
Adams’ views were reflected in some of his strips. In one in 2022, a boss says that traditional performance reviews would be replaced by a “wokeness” score. When an employee complains that could be subjective, the boss said, “That’ll cost you two points off your wokeness score, bigot.”
Adams put a brave face on his fall from grace, tweeting in 2023: “Only the dying leftist Fake News industry canceled me (for out-of-context news of course). Social media and banking unaffected. Personal life improved. Never been more popular in my life. Zero pushback in person. Black and White conservatives solidly supporting me.”
